i just red an interview with Tim Sweeney (creator of Unreal) about "unreal engine 3".
its from january 12 2005.
http://gamesdomain.yahoo.com/preview/28441

"
Personality
We asked for more predictions. "By 2010, I think we'll be photo-realistic in outdoor and indoor environments," claimed Sweeney. "But I think we'll fall very short of reality in the areas of realistic character animation and interaction. A lot of the problems we're facing in upcoming games center around simulating human thought. Right now, when you walk up to a game character in Half-Life 2 and have a conversation, it's pre-recorded... but in the future, it's not going to be."

Sweeney anticipates an age where games will be able to generate dialogue from just a definition of a character's personality. "Ten years from now, having characters wander around photo-realistic environments saying canned phrases just won't cut it. But there's a lot of basic research needed before we can get past this point."

The only thing that's stopped Sweeney from producing totally photo-realistic games has been the limitations of computer hardware. "Producing realistic simulations of environments is quite simple," he said "We just need enough brute force computing power. We're not quite there yet."

"From looking at the capacity of the human visual system," Sweeney continued, "you can work out that current graphics cards need to improve by about a factor of 10,000 to match its potential. We'll get there at some point in the next 20 years."

And what happens then? Sweeney smiled. "It'll be interesting to see. Maybe games will play us."
"

seems pretty cool i think.
i cant wait to play Tomb Raider 15 where lara are all photo realistic and not pre-recorded at all :D
Lara has such a great personality, its gonna be fun when she "play us".

Gomes

27-04-05, 10:48

How on Earth will they take AI that far? How will a computer game character be able to "think"? Or did I misunderstood what they meant.

A lot of the problems we're facing in upcoming games center around simulating human thought...cos it asks for a lot and lot of CPU power, which would be impossible to do with nowdays CPUs (with acceptable frame-rate) The same thing with AI (which eats a lot of CPU), pre-recorded animations don't need a lot of calculation, yeah cos they are pre-recorded of course :D .

What if video game AI gets out of control and we end up slaves of video games instead of robots in the future?!

irjudd

28-04-05, 14:31

Sleepless nights... missed meals... soiling yourself because you can't leave the couch... I think we already ARE slaves to video games :D

Geck-o-Lizard

28-04-05, 17:14

We don't use AI like that in video games just now because we don't yet have the knowledge to create AI capable of simulating human thought, not because of the relative lack of processing power...

If you're interested in AI, btw, keep your eyes peeled for "Cyc" from Cycorp (http://www.cyc.com) which is due to be released online this year, as a next-generation AI you can interact with via the internet. It made its way into last week's New Scientist so I think it'll be worth listening out for. ;)

[ 28. April 2005, 18:16: Message edited by: Geck-o-Lizard ]

sanjalemajic

28-04-05, 22:05

That was scary... http://www.tombraiderforums.com/images/smilies/yikes.gif
Cool, but scary...
But cool.

RavenLettan

28-04-05, 23:41

Problem is that companies are trying to jump, rather than hop.

There was an interactive AI developed with one of the games that I was working on at one point. While you couldn't have a full conversation with it, you could talk to it in key phrases that it would understand and respond to by creating a string. It's not next generation stuff but it was a step in the right direction. http://www.tombraiderforums.com/images/smilies/smile.gif

Honestly I don't think Epic are going to be the first to hallmark this area. Neither do I see Valve doing it either.

The problem is while they believe that interaction on that level is what gamers want, for the most part.. we actually like being dragged along with interactive stories.

This is why Resident Evil 4 just appeals to so many people. Because you don't get full control in cut-scene but you have the ability to dodge, making you feel part of them. If you had to actually fight though you'd totally miss the storyline in order to concentrate on the gameplay. Just like alot of storyline in Half-Life 2 was lost to the action sequences.
Especially near the end with the City17 Resistance fight.

Developers need to try and keep thier feet on the ground balancing fun with realism. After all people demand realism, but then they damand this nice everything glows Bloom effect in each game. Which isn't something your eyes do, it's something Movie cameras do.

So really they're not looking for realism of some spotty teenager who's voice has barely broken, but they want the nice hollywood realism they see on the silver screen. That just really case-and-points my original point about gamers wanting an interactive story rather than a full control over everything.